Stillness? I’ve never heard of her!
Yoga teacher training, tarot and self-worth beyond productivity
This summer I flew to Thailand to complete my yoga teacher training. The course was a full schedule: 3 weeks, 6 days a week, 11 hours a day. We spent the days meditating, taking yoga classes, practising teaching, learning about yoga history, philosophy, anatomy, somatics, spirituality, and different asanas and their correct form.
A girl could not ask for more!!! I was so excited, verging on ecstatic for the majority of the course. I’ve wanted to do my YTT for so long and I had that rare ‘holy shit, I can’t believe I am really here and doing this!!’ feeling almost everyday of the course.
Even when I felt physically and emotionally exhausted, I was bursting with an internal monologue reminding me that I had dreamed of doing this for years and how different these 3 weeks would be from any other time in my life. I knew how transformative the experience could be and I wanted to be as present and in the moment as possible to ensure I got the most out of the training. I felt grateful for the tears, the emotions and the depths that the course allowed me to reach; a sort of prolonged awe that I was in Thailand and getting to experience this.
At the same time, I was running on a lot of ~holy shit I feel aligned and life is so expansive~ adrenaline, which can be a nice side effect of travelling and experiencing something completely new, but an adrenaline rush is a precarious, unpredictable high.
This feeling of alignment and groundedness was of course enhanced in more long-term, stable ways through the spiritual practices and teachings incorporated into our schedule, practices that naturally encourage and create space for presence, gratitude and the feeling that you are in the right place and doing the right thing. But in the back of my mind, I felt an ominous fear that things were too good to be true, and that when I came down from such high feelings of joy and fulfilment, I would crash hard.
I had never felt such peace and presence, but my mind was often transporting me into the future - what would happen when I finish my course and return to my ‘real life’? How would I feel? How would I cope with busyness, responsibilities, money worries or relationship worries or friendship worries? It was a feeling of ‘what next?’ dragging me away from the peace of my present moment and into future problems my mind was creating.
Finding no-thingness, defining no-thingness?
The day after we completed our exams and celebrated our graduation, some of us went to an ecstatic dance event in the forest called Pyramid. I was still on a high from the past weeks and in slight disbelief that I had managed to lead a full hour class with confidence, pass my written exam and experience a 3-week period without anxiety.
Taking a break from dancing, I sat on the corner of the dance floor and looked up at everyone moving so freely and authentically, at 11am on a Sunday morning, without substances and that hazy sense of self-consciousness and judgement that seems to lurk in so many of the dancing and nightlife events I have attended over the past years in London.
I approached a man sitting beneath a tree outside of the event space, offering donation-based tarot readings. He asked me what I wanted to gain from the reading. I told him that I wasn’t sure, that I had just finished an intense 3-week YTT, and now I had a month of freedom before I started my new job.
As I spoke this aloud, I concluded that maybe I was looking for guidance in regards to how I should use this free time. During the course, we had every hour of our day planned for us and basically every decision made for us, from what we were going to eat, to what time we got up. Our lives were also very ‘stripped back’. We didn’t have mirrors so were more disconnected from our appearance, we barely wore makeup and wore yoga clothes everyday, we were on our phones less, we didn’t watch TV, we didn’t party or go shopping or really go outside of the place we did our training, so I was experiencing a feeling of ‘what now?’ after we finished and the protective bubble of my training started to fray. The tarot cards I picked were:
No-thingness
Schizophrenia
The tarot man smiled and said something along the lines of ‘Ah, everyone is doing so well today! Everyone is on the path to stillness.’ He told me I had ‘satisfied my ego’ by gaining my 200-hour training, and now I will likely be wondering what’s next? But what's next is the no-thingness; just sitting with things as they are, inhaling and exhaling in the gap.
I straight up do not know what no-thingness is! During our YTT, our teacher warned us against the seduction of the competitive, goals-driven path in spirituality and self-development work, telling us: ‘This is not the healing olympics!’
Despite espousing a ‘be easy on yourself’ life mantra, I often find myself implementing traditional eastern practices of stillness, slowness and presence in a goals-focused, productivity-oriented, ego-centric way; but it is so hard to truly separate from this. In achievement-driven, capitalist societies, it’s difficult to even imagine how true separation from this mentality would look. Being fully present or still feels almost impossible when everything around us encourages the opposite.
I have often distanced myself from this societal problem by assigning a higher moral value to certain things I do to stay distracted VS other things I could do to stay distracted, e.g. doing multiple yoga classes VS going out drinking multiple nights a week, or filling my calendar with different cultural activities VS filling it with dates with different people.
However, I know both choices can be intentional ways of staying busy and avoiding the discomfort that can accompany stillness. The fact I felt this impending fear during my YTT about what would come next, is a direct reflection of my struggle to stay in the moment and be fully present. That is not intended as a self-deprecating statement, just an acknowledgement of how hard connecting with this no-thingness is, even when we are on a slow, grounded and spirituality-oriented path.
Although I never considered my YTT as something to do with my ego, of course it is. So many of my goals and interests (healthy and unhealthy) are based on the optimism that achieving XYZ could make me accept myself more: doing well at school/university, long-distance running, learning more, trying to achieve certain jobs, writing more, fitness, yoga, weight loss and trying to look a certain way.
My conscious motivations for pursuing my YTT were not directly about my ego, but my encounter with the tarot reader prompted me to think about the subconscious reasons behind my decision in a way I hadn’t considered before.
A love hate relationship with my daily planner
Ever since I was a teenager I have been fixated on scheduling, planning and organising. I love writing to-do lists; but at the same time I feel suffocated by them. They are never complete!!! When I write, plan, organise, scribble down time-blocked activities for each day of the week, meal plans, workout plans and my excessive to-do list of things that may or may not really need to be done, ranging from ‘send rent payment’ to ‘untangle my jewellery’, I feel a surge of optimism, ‘ok, i'm going to have a productive day today! I’m going to be that bitch.’
Truthfully, I like this aspect of myself; it shows optimism and commitment to self-betterment. It makes me feel hopeful about my future. But I still haven’t unpacked the entanglement of all of these elements of joy and guilt and self-acceptance and self-hate and capitalism and productivity. I haven’t untangled the fact that this is how I orient most of the hours of my days, even on my weekends, I struggle to live differently. I haven’t untangled the feelings associated with the fact that I never really complete all the tasks I set out for myself, that it helps me clear my mind to imagine all of these things getting done, then brings me a sense of failure when I don’t tick them off the list. This is such a messy, personal and ever-changing space.
I have theoretically been interested in the concept of ‘doing nothing’ as capitalist resistance for several years. My master’s dissertation was an anti-productivity analysis of the ‘psychic life of neoliberalism’ in Ottessa Moshfegh’s My Year of Rest and Relaxation, and I had an academic essay published titled ‘The Myth of Neutral Tech and the Politics of Not Doing in the Attention Economy,’ so this is an area I have been heavily invested in and thought deeply about. But the fact that I can't even begin to comprehend, let alone apply, this idea to my own life highlights just how deeply ingrained and normalised the idea of productivity as a means to self-acceptance is.
I do not have a strong sense of self beyond productivity or action, and complicatedly, I resist knowing this version of myself because life is so short and there is SO MUCH I WANT TO DO! This yearning is eloquently described by Sylvia Plath:
‘I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And why do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in my life. And I am horribly limited.’
The desire to do it all is a reflection of passion, drive and curiosity and at the same time it can be debilitating.
Where do you find no-thingness?
The Osho Zen tarot decks’ ‘no-thingness’ card stems from the Sanskrit ‘shunyata’ which actually means ‘everything’: it vibrates with all possibilities. It is fully potential. It has not yet been manifested, but contains everything. The no-thingness card alludes to a space or a state of consciousness where there is nothing to do, nowhere to go apart from inside. In this way, I could come to understand no-thingness as a place of no want, accepting that nature is the beginning and nature is the end and becoming ‘restless, anxious and ambitious’ in the middle is a self-created path to despair.
I am grateful that I can often find comfort in stillness. I can meditate for long periods of time, I can do a 90 minute breathwork class comfortably and I love practising hatha and yin yoga, styles that allow me to go deeper into my internal space. My problem is that I often perceive these times of stillness as specific blocks in an otherwise busy day, e.g. I will finish my breathwork or meditation class and think OK, what now? Time for vinyasa, journaling on the beach, lunch date with friend ~ etc, etc. These activities are amazing ways to spend the day and I feel so lucky to have had the freedom to fill my days like this, but a productivity-centric mind can make these things end up feeling like tasks, my orientation robotic, seeing a list of things to do rather than really feeling into those moments and experiences fully.
I can’t comprehend not perceiving my day in this way, even when my body is telling me to slow down, I often resist and deny that knowledge. Conceptually, I can accept that I do not need to plan my time like this, I do not need to achieve in order to accept myself. But it remains a guiding motivation in how I plan my days and my life. The joy that comes from ‘doing good’ is inseparable from the self/societal pressure to be a certain way and make certain external changes before finding happiness or peace. My scheduling is often an attempt to control and manage, in a world that feels fluctuating and austere; where I am constantly trying to hold on to fleeting moments and longing for past memories, places or people.
There are so many things I want to do, not just in the sense of ego-gratification but also because I want to experience so many different things: different facets of life, places, types of love, types of art, music, movies, food, movement, textures, feelings and emotions in this little, little life! I guess finding guidance in this tarot reading would be trying to shift that mentality of temporary-ness, lack, austerity, need and self-judgement. Maybe considering the moments I want to hold on to and the things I want to experience as infinite, cyclical, and abundant. Maybe believing that I can cross paths with the people I want to fill my calendar seeing, believing that I have enough time to do all the yoga classes and the journaling workshops and attend the exhibitions and gain a deep and rich experience of life, maybe accepting that I already have everything I am trying to grasp and hold on to: I have love, I have time, I have self-acceptance and I have slowness, stability and peace.
taylor your mind 😭😭 this was incredible. I was nodding my head profusely when you spoke about making those moments of slowness and being present into tasks on a to do list! I am guilty! and the concept of no-thingness has blown me away, nothing is everything, the beginning and the end wow yeah I'm gonna have to look into that. I will now stop rambling but I love this sm!!